Ward 19

The following notice comes from Gabrielle Langlois, Davenport West Bike Project Coordinator at the Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre:

Hi,

I am writing to let you know about a new health promotion initiative in the Davenport west area.

The Davenport West bike project aims to create/further develop bike culture and increase physical activity and awareness that physical activity can help improve health and well being. We ran a successful pilot this past summer (13 free bike clinics) and with new funding from the Ministry of Health Promotion and Sport, will run a more developed project until the fall of 2011. From Dec. 2010 to March 2011 it will include training for volunteers (bike repair, health promotion, healthy eating, safe riding/injury prevention), and in the spring/summer of 2011 will include free community bike clinics and community rides.

The most important election facing Toronto is this Monday. A lot of people that I have talked to still are not sure who they are voting for or even who is running. Lawns and windows are festooned with political signs with names that are somehow familiar and then not so familiar. So who do you vote for?

Now I am not talking about the mayor’s race. My prediction is that some guy is going to make it in and they are not going to do nearly as much as they promised. So now that we got that out of the way let us focus on the more important race, the ward race.

The Mayor only has one vote, as does your councilor so it is doubly important to put your vote that matches your way of thinking. Councilors are way more accessible then your average Mayor and easier to hunt down and confront if they do not do what they promised to do.

I live in Ward 19 and there are a lot of great people running. We are blessed with a great group of candidates who on their own rights would make excellent councilors. After talking with the candidates and looking at their platforms, I am putting my vote behind Karen Sun.

Karen Sun is the best person to defend our cycling infrastructure, our parks and make the streets safe for all users. She understands the importance of a well funded transit system, she knows that Subways are not the silver bullet to our transit woes and that Queen and King streetcars carry more people during rush hour then Highway 401.

As a member of the newly-formed Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee, I will be attending a meeting next week with Antonio Medeiros, a project manager at Waterfront Toronto. He is working on the design for the Martin Goodman Trail at Ontario Place that will run along the south side of Lakeshore Drive directly south of Exhibition Place.

The Waterfront Toronto team is at the beginning stages of the design work and are hoping for some cyclist feedback and thoughts about the project. In particular, the design team is concerned with safely accommodating multiple trail users, as well as creating safe and easy-to-navigate intersections where vehicular traffic must intersect. Please read the following description of the project, as it stands now, and post your comments. This project is already approved and will be completed quickly, with or without cyclists’ input. The more ideas I can bring to the table at this time, the better. Thanks for contributing!